Run
by PragmaticHominid
Summary: The red boy was frowning in a way that seemed very cold to Raven, and that scared her. The surprise of finding she was not alone in the Xavier mansion scared her too, and she felt her disguise slipping away, the scales turning like a cascade of water, leaving her grown tinier and blue and she saw his eyes widen, saw recognition in them, but by then she had turned and was running...
1. Chapter 1

**I.**

Raven craned her head to look up at the mansion. Its walls loomed over her, blocking out the sky. She was bigger than she was used to being at the moment, rattling around in Sharon Xavier's skin, but still it seemed incomprehensibly huge.

This was going to be the big take, her father had told her; the people who lived here were richer than god and if they pulled this one off they wouldn't ever need to hit another house again.

Raven wanted very much to believe that this was the truth. But her father had said the same thing at least twice before, and here she was anyway. At it again.

She held the lockpicks close against her too-tall belly. Normally, she was very good with them – she'd had a lot of practice – but the lady's hands, pale-cream colored with red paint on the nails, were an awkward fit, and they didn't want to do exactly what she told them to do.

And she was taking too long.

At least there weren't any nearby neighbors close enough to see them, not on a big estate like this one, but someone – a groundskeeper, maybe – might happen by any time. Who knew? She was wearing her disguise, but someone might see through it – they might call the police.

She was very afraid of being put into a prison, was scared that if she told the police, "But I'm just little!" they wouldn't believe her. They would say, "You look grown-up to us so that is how it's going to be," but things had the potential to be much worse than that; if they saw her blue – and they would have to if they kept her in prison for very long at all, because she was only able to look normal for a little bit – they might decide that she wasn't even human, and then anything at all could happen.

Also – if she took too long her father would get angry.

Raven glanced back over her shoulder furtively, the string of pearls she'd grown around her neck rattling, and saw him sitting in the limousine. Her father was wearing his own disguise – a chauffeur's uniform. If anyone asked why they were here, Raven was supposed to just say that she lived here, thank you very much, and that man down there was her driver.

Then everything would be okay, as long as she didn't screw it up.

Her father said.

He was just sitting there in the limo, though, on the other end of the long walkway, and he'd never see if she just...

Raven let go of just a corner of the thing, inside of herself, that she was holding onto with such a desperate grip, and the scales on her hands began to turn over, flipping right-side-up until the hands that held the lockpicks were small and blue, her very own hands, and they listened better than the lady's hands had, though they were shaking a little bit.

After a few moment, the door swung open and Raven stepped inside.

**II.**

It was dark inside the mansion, so Raven gave herself cat's eyes so she could see. The suitcase hanging off her shoulder was heavy already, and she hadn't even begun to fill it up yet. Big, slit-pupil eyes taking in everything around her, she headed upstairs – the jewelry would be up there, probably in a safe in the master bedroom.

Along the way, she paused to look at a picture on the wall. It showed a sandy-haired boy a couple of years older than herself, smiling at the camera with an open, gap-toothed grin. She liked that boy's face – he looked much nicer than the woman she was being right now – and since it was easier for her to be little than big, she slipped into his skin, making up the details that the photo didn't show.

She opened the first door she came to on the second floor, and saw immediately that she wouldn't find good pickings in that room, but she went inside anyway. It was the boy's room, she thought – the room of the boy she was being – and she looked around curiously, wondering what it was like for him to live someplace like this.

A baseball bat leaned against the wall beside the bed – a weapon, she thought, looking at it, a weapon kept within easy reach. Siting on the desk, there was a framed picture of a man with long funny whiskers. Raven didn't know who the man was – she had never so much as heard the name "Charles Darwin" – but she had a second sense for faces, and could tell at a glance that he wasn't related to the boy... and that seemed sad, somehow.

There was a little leather-bound book sitting on the table as well – a dairy, she realized with a start, and she stepped further into the room, picking it up, though she had only recently begun to absorb the most rudimentary basics of reading.

She opened the book, looking down at the oddly mature script which filled the pages in more or less straight lines. "...not the only... the only one who is..." she began, speaking out loud as she ran her finger under a line at random, then frowned, flummoxed by the next word. Raven squinted at it with her cat's eyes, gnawing at her lower-lip.

The bedside light came on, and Raven looked up sharply, her heart fluttering like a trapped bird inside her narrow chest, and saw a big lanky boy sitting up in the bed, where before she had thought there was only a mound of blankets.

He was watching her with one pale blue eye, as the other was hidden beneath a tangle of bandages that covered a third of his head. His skin was bright red and in her shock at the sudden flood of light and his unexpected presence she thought, _He's bloody all over,_ and it would only be much later, once she'd had a chance to control her panic, that she would realize that it was only his skin – that that was the way his skin was, just a funny color, the same as hers was. A tail lashed speculatively at his side.

The boy was frowning in a way that seemed very cold to Raven, and that scared her. It all scared her – the surprise of finding that she was not alone in the big house, the way he looked, that harsh frown – and she felt her disguise slipping away, the scales flipping over like a cascade of cold water, leaving her grown tinier and blue and she saw his uncovered eye widen, saw astonishment and then recognition in it, saw his lips part to say something, but by then she had turned and was running.

**III.**

And she came out of the mansion as fast as she could, running, breathless and blue, and her father got out of the car in a hurry, looking every which way in a panic to see what she was running from – to see if anyone was looking – and for a moment she had a very strange thought, which was that he looked so _dumb_ twisting his head around like that.

And then he snatched her up hard and shoved her into the backseat of the limo, and when she was in there, cowering back against the black leather seats, he got halfway inside too, his front half in the car with her and so big and scary and she couldn't get away because he had her by the wrists and that _hurt_. He looked at her in a way that was so much meaner than the red boy had before he'd seen that she was blue, and then Raven started to cry.

And she had tried to explain to him about the boy, but he wasn't listening and maybe she wasn't telling right, but how could she when he was yelling at her in that voice that wasn't loud enough to really be yelling, but that was so dangerous?

Eventually, though, he caught onto the fact that there was someone in the house, and how he was asking – demanding with increasing panic to know – what she had done with the bag. His fingerprints were on the bag, and his never changed.

Raven didn't know. She couldn't even remember letting go of the bag, and –

And there was a _thrump_ sound outside, on the other side of the limo. It was like the dull crack of distant thunder, and her father straightened, and Raven saw his hand reach for the gun that he wore on his hip.

Raven crawled across the seats to look out of the tinted window on the other side.

And there was the bag, standing crookedly in the snow.

Raven's own tracks – shod and woman-sized as well as small and bare – ran up to the mansion and back down to the limo, but there were no tracks leading to or away from the bag. There was only one single set of footprints.

She wondered if her father noticed that as he stomped over to the bag and snatched it up and flung it in the car after her, looking about suspiciously because _how had it gotten there? _and he'd gotten in behind the wheel of the limo and they drove away fast.

And the entire way back home he shouted at her in that quiet, dangerous way, and when they got there he'd taken her up to her room and locked the door behind her.

Raven had a pretty good idea that she could break that door down if she tried – she was a lot stronger than she had any right to be, her father said, and sometimes she thought that scared him – but if she did he would be angry at her, and _that_ scared Raven.

So instead, she laid down on her bed to think about what had happened, and when the tears started again she was no longer sure just why she was crying.

**IV.**

Azazel watched from a window on the top floor of the mansion as the limo drove away. He held his lanky form very straight, his hands behind his back, long fingers steepled, reflecting upon the blue girl with the changeable skin and the man who had been with her, as well as his own current situation, with all the pensiveness that a shell-shocked twelve-year-old could muster.

He was not at all sure why he had come to be where he was now.

Three days ago (Or had it been more? Less? The time zones were confusing to him) he had been in the USSR, and in the USSR there was war.

Three days ago he had also been among friends. He had been at the childrens' home, which three days ago had still been standing.

There had been the war there (though at the time it had often seemed distant) and there had been hunger and cold and want, but there had also been others like himself – well, not _exactly_ like himself, because he was quite sure that there was no one else in the world who was anything at all like himself.

But there had been other _talented_ children, in any case.

The triplets who held private conversations amongst themselves without ever moving their lips, and who could draw the most secret of thoughts from anyone's mind. The boy who could could cause things to move without touching them, the girl who could make the earth underfoot move to her will.

His friends and family and comrades, all of them, though they had been markedly younger than Azazel himself, and none of them had shared any of the physical oddities he possessed.

Five days (Six? Four? It wasn't simply a matter of time zones... he was fairly certain that he had lost at least twelve hours somewhere along the way) ago, the soldiers had come to the childrens' home. Their commander had said that it was past time that the lot of them join the war effort, that the Motherland needed them.

The director of the childrens' home hadn't liked any of that, and though she had not wasted anyone's time on useless arguments, it was evident that she believed that her charges were all much too young to be asked to take part in such dangerous work.

But Azazel had been ready to go to war. He wasn't a small child like the others, after all. He could fight – he'd had the training, hadn't he, he had been groomed for assassinations and so he knew how it was done – and he _wanted_ to fight. He wanted to go and kill the Nazis who were torturing his country.

They had all left the childrens' home together, their director and the soldiers and the other talented children, and Azazel had walked into their private train car so bundled up in furs that the other people on the platform couldn't see a patch of his skin.

All of that had been a great adventure, so much so that he had found himself drifting off to sleep almost as soon as the train had departed, despite all of his best efforts.

He never knew exactly what caused the destruction of their train. Had there been an explosion in the engine, had collaborators sabotaged the tracks or planted bombs along the rails?

All Azazel knew was that he had awoken to screams and a hideous squealing of metal, and then something sharp and very heavy had struck him across the face. He teleported away reflexively.

Outside, he watched with the blood freezing on his face as the train cars piled up, crumpling like tin cans under a jackboot. It was not long before the fires had begun to spread.

Azazel managed to find one part of the telepathic trio alive inside the wreck, and carried him outside. Everyone else who had been in their car – children, director, soldiers – was dead, but inexplicably the dark-haired boy seemed entirely unharmed, at least so far as Azazel could ascertain, crouching in the blowing snow beside the boy's still form.

Nonetheless, the boy had seemed entirely catatonic. Azazel thought it was Pavel that he he had found but he was not entirely sure; the three of them had been so hard to tell apart, had never seemed like individual persons but rather three parts of a whole.

The cars farther down the train had not been as badly damaged as Azazel's own, and many of the soldiers who had been riding inside these cars had already emerged, dragging their wounded with them. The idea of speaking to so many strangers might have been intimidating under different circumstances – Azazel's circle of acquaintances had, previous to all of this, been extremely circumscribed – but the situation was so desperate that there had not been time for such considerations.

He'd looked to the soldiers for help.

The reaction was swift and ugly. He was met with curses, enraged shouting, outrageous accusations. Many of the soldiers had rural accents, and it had taken him longer than it might have otherwise to understand that they were accusing him of all manners of thing – of having derailed the train himself, of being a demon and a devil, of meaning to kill all of them.

It was at this point that he realized that his face had become uncovered and that his tail was out, lashing back and forth in fear and agitation.

"This is absurd," he said, and was unnerved by the tremor in his own voice. _I was heading off to kill Nazis_, he thought wildly, _and I wasn't scared at all_. How was it now that his own countrymen were aligning against him? "Backwards superstitions... nothing more..." he started again, but that didn't seem powerful enough.

"Comrades!" he shouted, though in the normal course of things a twelve-year-old would not have referred to grown men as such, "Surely you know better than this."

The soldiers were crossing themselves, forking the evil eye at him, and he hardly understood some of the things that they were shouting at him; his own religious education had been very nearly nonexistent.

"This boy is hurt," he tried again, and the freezing wind lashed against his own wounded face.

"He – we – need help."

Somewhere in the crowd, he heard the cocking of a gun.

Azazel turned sharply toward the sound, his eyes blazing, and at the same time his hand slid as though by its own volition down to the long knife that was still hanging sheathed against his hip.

And then he simply allowed his training to take over.

It was surprising, really, when all was said and done, how easy it was to transform theory into practice, to apply to real human flesh techniques which he had hitherto only used against dummies.

He teleported, reappearing behind the back of the soldier who had drawn his gun. Before he could turn, Azazel reached up to grip the arm that held the gun, twisting it, hearing the crackling of breaking bone, understanding truly and for the first time just how much more powerful he was than a normal human.

The screaming ended when Azazel drew the man down to his own level and cut his throat from behind.

The soldier's gun fell from his lifeless fingers and into the snow, and Azazel allowed the soldier to fall after it. He twitched, bleeding out face down in the snow, while Azazel eyed the crowd viciously.

He expected that they would fall upon him then, and upon Pavel as well.

Instead, they ran.

**V.**

He could not teleport with Pavel – it would be years still until Azazel's ability developed to the point that he could carry another person along with him – and so he hoisted the boy's unmoving form up into his arms and set out.

Inside his mind's eye he was mapping out the terrain ahead of them, drawing on the same talent that allowed him to teleport sight-unseen into new places. It was in this way he located the abandoned charcoal-maker's hut; the shelter was only a few kilometers away, but in the wind and snow it was a cruel march.

Azazel left Pavel in the hut and teleported away, returning directly with food, blankets, coal for a fire, but none of it made any difference.

It was bad to be alone – Azazel had since learned that very well in the days following the train wreck – and Pavel did not seem to know how to live that way. In the absence of his brothers, Pavel himself had no definition. Before the night was over, the boy had died as well.

**VI. **

After that, Azazel had only wanted to be _away_. To be _somewhere else_.

He closed his eyes and found the great empty mansion in New York – what place could possibly be more different from his miserable little shack? – and he _went_.

And that was how he had come to be where he was when the little blue girl found him, napping in a stranger's bed.

After the girl had gone away – after Azazel had watched from the attic window as the man drove her away in that long black car – he went back to the bedroom and picked up the book that the girl had dropped on the floor there.

It belonged in the room, Azazel knew – that was why he hadn't returned it to the girl along with her bag, and now he tucked it into his pocket and headed downstairs. The girl was heavy in his thoughts – the _implications _of her, of finding her here – and in his mind's eye he traced the movements of the black car as it carried her wherever it was headed.

He put together something to eat quickly, considering his next move. Azazel didn't consider it stealing to take what he needed from the mansion's pantry. It seemed to him that it was theft for the owners of this mansion to have kept so much food to themselves, hoarding it away when there was a war on and so many were starving.

Azazel opened the journal at the table, wondering why the thing had attracted the girl's attention.

His English was not especially strong, and it took him quite a while to puzzle his way through the journal. Nonetheless, he read it attentively, the girl almost forgotten on the edge of his consciousness, for the author – a young Mister Charles Francis Xavier, according to the inside cover – had a great deal to say on topics which were of great personal interest to Azazel.

Once he was finished, he flipped back to the beginning of the journal and began to reread, returning to specific passages which seemed especially important or which he had not understood fully.

After that, Azazel set quietly at the table for a long time, thinking hard, weighing his options, making a plan.

The book was one thing, and the girl was another... He could not exactly see her – his ability didn't give him that skill – but he could _sense_ where she was. She'd stopped moving, and Azazel took that to mean that she'd come to wherever it was that she called home, which was exactly what he had been waiting for.

Once he had made up his mind, Azazel moved quickly.

He found a pen and added his own message to the journal, his neat and economical handwriting marching across the page beneath Charles' most recent entry. Then he returned the journal to its rightful place.

He homed in on the girl's location, and went.


	2. Chapter 2

**I.**

There was a sound like distant thunder, but very close – almost right beside Raven.

She lifted her head from her pillow and looked around sharply. When she saw the boy standing there she sat up very quickly, scooting across the mattress until her back came up against the wall. That hurt – there were bruises back there, _he _had hit her – but she was used to hurting, and at the moment the pain didn't seem all that important.

Strangely, she felt less afraid than she thought she ought to be. Not very surprised, either, that the boy was somehow here.

He was lanky, thin but in a way that denoted strength. Raven had an instinct for how bodies were put together, and she could tell at a glance that those economical, tightly-coiled muscles would be very, very strong. His hands and feet were very big, and that reminded her of a large-breed puppy whose body hadn't quite grown to fit its paws yet.

And he was red. Really and actually bright _red_ in the same way that she was really and actually _blue_.

Maybe that was part of the reason why he didn't scare her very much, though there was such an air of menace to him – of danger curled just below the surface, ready to spring.

The boy was watching her while she watched him, studying her with that one unbandaged, icy blue eye. He cocked his head to the side and asked, "Girl, why are you crying?" His English was heavily-accented, and though she might have mimicked his voice exactly she did not know enough of the world to judge where he had come from by that accent.

"I'm _not_," she said, swiping ruthlessly at her eyes to dry them. "I _never_ was_ crying_."

Raven glared at him as fiercely as she could and the boy shrugged, seeming to accept her words. He sat down on the edge of the bed, draping his hands bonelessly over the sharp angles of his knees. Raven drew her own legs in suspiciously, knees against bellybutton, taking up the smallest possible space.

"I'm Raven..." she said tentatively.

He looked over at her, eyebrow cocked. "Azazel."

She grinned at that, a wide and toothy grin. "That's a strange kinda name."

Azazel puffed out his narrow chest. "I am 'strange' kind of person," he said gravely.

"Yeah," Raven said. She scooted across the bed until she was sitting beside him. "Me too."

"There is word for us," Azazel said, as pleased as if he had coined it himself, rather than simply reading it in the journal. "There is word that I am only learning today." He paused for dramatic effect and said, "'_Mutant_.'

"Where I am coming from, there is no such word... only code word, and he is changing every weeks. But _Mutant_. Is very good, yes?"

Raven nodded uncertainly. She wasn't sure that she actually liked the sound of the word... but it was much nicer than some of the names her father had used for her.

Azazel's tail was swaying carefully between them, and Raven stared at it. The tip looked very sharp.

She concentrated for a moment, and then a second tail snaked out from behind her to wave slowly next to Azazel's. It was exactly the same shape as his own, but slightly smaller and blue instead of red.

Azazel gave a bark of surprised laughter, and Raven raised one finger to her own lips, shushing him. "He'll wake up!" she whispered, a note of panic in her voice.

Azazel frowned, cocked his head to the side as though listening. He was quiet for a long moment, but then he seemed to dismiss threat in favor of returning to the topic at hand, though now he kept his voice low. "But you have tail!" he said.

"Not most of the time..." she said. She had never had a chance to explain herself to someone else before, and she found herself suddenly flummoxed as to how to do it. "I just... decided to have one right now. That's what I can do – I copy people. I can... I can look like anyone I want to. For a little while... makes me tired to do it too much."

Azazel was nodding emphatically. "It is the same from me. When I..." he trailed off, frowning, apparently hunting for a word. He snapped his fingers. "When I _move_," he said at last, in obvious concession to a limited vocabulary.

"Move?" Raven repeated uncertainly. It took a long time for Azazel to find a way to explain his ability in a manner that she could understand, but once she did her expression turned wistful. "Wish I could do something like that... I'd just go as far away as I could."

Azazel opened his mouth to respond, but then something caught his eye. Raven realized almost at the same instant what it was that he had seen, and tried to hide her arm behind her back. But he reached out and caught her by the wrist, just above the crescent-shaped gouges that marked her forearm. His grip was not painful but it was unrelenting, and he drew her arm closer to his face, studying the cuts.

The bruises, of which there were many, didn't show much against the blue of her skin – but the marks where her father's fingernails had dug into her skin hard enough to draw blood were very visible.

Azazel let go of her arm. "He is father of you?" he asked, and now there was something very, very dangerous in his voice. His hand crept down to the side of his hip to touch the hilt of the long knife – _A sword? _Raven wondered with astonishment – that was sheathed there. She hadn't noticed the weapon before.

"Don't!" she said. "Please don't hurt him, okay?"

He growled at that, but his hand came away from the blade unwillingly. Azazel crossed his arms over his chest. "You want to leave from here?" he asked.

"Yes," Raven answered, without the slightest hesitation. As soon as she had said the word she realized how desperately she really wanted it. "I want... I wanna go with you. Can I? Please?"

Azazel got to his feet in one smooth, fluid motion, like a cat rising from a nap. "Then we will go," he said.

**II.**

The door to Raven's room was locked, but after all that wasn't a difficult problem to resolve; Azazel simply teleported to the other side of the door and opened it for her.

Azazel had a sort of horror of locked doors – the idea of having one's freedom of movement curtailed in that way, of being _trapped_, was something that he could only imagine, but the simple thought of it was enough to leave him in a cold sweat. He did not understand how anyone could live under such conditions, but the fact that Raven had been forced to only multiplied his anger against her father.

That rage, black and murderous, was something that he was trying with a great deal of difficulty to keep in check, though only for the sake of the girl. Had things been up to him he would have gone downstairs and cut the old man's throat.

But she did not want that, so instead they had simply resolved to leave.

"Back to the house of Xavier – that is where we will go," he had told Raven.

Raven worried at her lower lip. "But what if he doesn't want us?"

"He will," Azazel said, with more confidence than he perhaps felt. But he quoted the journal from memory to prove his point: "'I cannot believe that I am the only one. There must be others like me – other Mutants. I need only to find them.' He is waiting for us."

"But what if he's mad at me – because I broke in?" she insisted, miserably. "Or what if – what if he's ascared of us, Azazel? He doesn't look like us... he's all normal looking, he might –"

"Then I will think of somewhere else," he said, more gruff than he meant to be. The truth was that he was still reeling badly from the events of only a few days before, when his entire life had been blown out from under him. He felt overwhelmed, in much too far over his head. He needed help, he felt, almost as badly as the girl did.

At the moment, he was pinning his hopes on the belief that the Xavier boy might provide it. He did not know how to proceed otherwise.

But he saw that his tone had frightened her, which he had in no way intended to do. "You mustn't worry," he said, as much to reassure himself as Raven. "I will look after you. No one will hurt you as long as I'm here – I promise this."

And there was so much hope in those yellow eyes, such a desperation to believe what he had said, that Azazel resolved to live up to that promise or else die in the effort.

**III. **

Raven led the way down the stairs and toward the front door.

Azazel had tried to go first, but she had told him, "I know the way," and had gone ahead before he could argue.

He was half a step behind her, a guardian shadow, but she winced at the way his heavy boots made the floorboards creak. She herself moved in almost complete silence on small bare feet.

They came to the front hall. The front door was at the other end of the hall, and between them and it, the entrance to the living room. Through that open doorway, she could hear her father snoring.

She stared down the hall, looking at the triple-locked front door with sudden, desperate horror. "I forgot," she hissed in anguish.

"What?" Azazel asked her.

His voice was loud, and she whipped around and reached up to put her hand over his lips. She shook her head violently.

He had that knife, and Raven believed that he knew how to use it – there was dried blood on the blade – but she just didn't think Azazel really understood how dangerous and unpredictable her father was.

Azazel had told her a lot about his life at the childrens' home, and though things there had been run in a very strict way, Raven did not get the sense that Azazel had felt as though he had been mistreated there. In fact, before very long it had come to her that he wasn't at all afraid of the adults in his life... an idea which she had barely been able to wrap her mind around.

He had been in training to become an assassin – one word which _Raven_ hadn't known, the meaning of which he had explained to her in very blunt terms and without any sense of shame. And though this struck her as a very frightening course of study, the casual violence that had marked her own life – the confusing accusations, the impossible demands, the inexplicable cuffs and kicks – seemed to be entirely absent from his own.

If Azazel had known hungry days, it was not as a punishment but simply because there was no food for anyone. If he had suffered bruises it was only in the course of a training regimen that was meant to make him stronger rather than to keep him small and scared.

He seemed entirely without fear, and if her assessment in that was not entirely accurate, it was nonetheless true that Azazel was not taking the threat that her father represented at all seriously.

And that was, she knew only too well, dangerous.

She looked back at the door.

It was locked. She had forgotten that somehow.

It was locked and it was locked tight and she didn't know where her father had hidden her lock picks.

Raven turned back and looked at Azazel.

"Stay here," she told him.

**IV.**

Her father was lying on the couch, an open newspaper resting over his face like a tent.

Raven could see the keys dangling from one of his belt loops, hanging from the same hip on which he still wore the gun.

He always had that gun. She was just starting to wonder if it was because of her.

She stood in the doorway for as long as she dared, wanting to be sure – to be _absolutely sure_ – that he was really asleep.

But she didn't know how long Azazel would wait out in the hall for her. What if he decided to follow, and came in here clomping on the floor with those big boots, and woke her father up? Or, an even worse thought – what if he got tired of waiting, and left without her?

And one more thing – the longer she waited, the greater the chance that he might just wake up on his own. Raven didn't want to find out what would happen if he did that and found her out of her room without permission.

She moved forward with a sudden decisiveness that was fed on panic, and bent over to unclip the keyring.

The newspaper crackled like thunder as her father reared up like a vengeful god and caught her by the wrist. The keys slipped from her hand and skidded across the floor.

He yanked her closer to him, pulling on her arm, drawing her up onto her tiptoes. "Just what do _you_ think you're doing?" he demanded, his voice soft and dangerous.

His grip on her wrist was hard. It was hurting her. "Please," she said. "Daddy, please – I just want to go away. Please just let me go away so nothing bad happens."

The grip became much tighter. She could feel the bones in her hand grinding against one another. "Are you threatening me?" he asked.

Raven jerked backwards, trying to pull away from him. It was the first time in her young life that she had really thought to actively _resist_ him, and to her astonishment she found that it was almost ludicrously easy for her to break his grip and come away free.

Her father, too, looked dumbfounded... but only for a moment. Then his eyes narrowed and he lurched to his feet, reaching out for her.

Behind her, Azazel spoke from the door. "Get away from her," he said.

**V.**

Azazel knew what he looked like. He understood that his appearance was frightening to vulgar and superstitious minds.

Now he meant to use that to his own advantage.

He moved to intimidate – to terrorize – stepping into the room with his head jutting forward and held low on his neck, glaring with pale eyes out from under his heavy brow, lips curled maliciously. His knife was in his hand and he held it at such an angle that the light reflected off the blade.

"The hell are you?" the man demanded.

Raven had not taken her eyes off her father. Her back was to Azazel, and she seemed somehow frozen. "Raven, come here," he said.

It had not yet come down to killing or being killed, though if not for the girl's objections Azazel would not have hesitated to make an end of the man who had hurt her. At that point, they might all still have walked away.

Then the man reached out and pulled Raven to him, pressing her against his chest and locking his elbow across her throat. His other hand drew the gun.

"_Have it your way_," Azazel growled lowly in Russian, for his own satisfaction, shifting the blade in his hand. Then he teleported.

Azazel appeared a few feet behind the man – his aim was not as good in those days as it would become – and charged at his back.

The man was quickly, though – astonishingly quick. He whirled around, using Raven like a shield, putting her between himself and Azazel's blade.

There was not enough time for Azazel to teleport, nor could he halt his own forward momentum. He veered to the side instead, diverting his course, and the man turned with him and lashed out with his leg, delivering a vicious kick to Azazel's ribs.

He hit the ground shoulder-first and slid across the floor. Raven's father turned the gun toward him and squeezed off two rounds, but Azazel wasn't there anymore.

Azazel was standing at the man's side, and the blade was against his throat. "Drop gun," he said. He pressed the knife against the bare skin of the man's throat, letting him feel the bite of it. "Drop girl."

Raven's father raised the gun in one smooth movement and rested the barrel against her temple. "I'll do it," he promised, and Azazel looked into the man's eyes and saw that it was true; there was nothing there that cared for the girl or her fate. "Drop the knife and back off."

There was a coppery taste inside Azazel's mouth.

He took a step back.

The sword dropped through the empty air and clattered to the ground.

Azazel was gone.

**VI. **

When Raven felt the barrel of the gun settle against the side of her head she had gone all icy inside. She froze, in her body and her mind and her heart.

And when her father finally lowered the gun, the first two thawed out but her heart stayed cold.

There was no doubting the way things were after something like that happened. There was no pretending that he loved her.

His arm was still across her throat. Raven shifted quickly, twisting her jaws up like those of a hyena she'd seen in a picture once, and bit him as hard as she could.

The pistol came up again, striking her against the side of the head, and then there wasn't anything but darkness.


	3. Chapter 3

**I.**

When Raven woke up, she was in the limo and the limo was rolling.

Her head hurt, worse than she could ever remember anything hurting, and she had taken enough beatings over the course of her short life to know what pain was. She lifted her head and the world began to spin and her stomach to lurch, and at the same time the fear came back because she remembered –

Raven remembered about her father.

She kept her eyes squeezed shut, against the spinning and against the nausea but most of all against the fear, but she knew he was there behind the wheel because she could hear him breathing. Behind her eyelids, Raven could sense perfectly the space he filled up, the size and shape of him.

For the longest time – for as long as she could remember – he had been the biggest thing in her life, but he seemed somehow reduced now. Perhaps it was only that the scope of her own world had increased so much that he now seemed petty by comparison.

"Daddy," she said, lifting her head slowly to watch him with eyes that wouldn't quite focus. She'd never called him _daddy_ before, but he no longer seemed great enough to warrant _father_. "Let me out of this car, Daddy. I don't want to be going anywhere with you – not ever again."

Her father snorted. "Like hell I'm letting go of my meal ticket that easily," he said, in a voice that was oddly slurred. Her father was not a drinker, but if he had been Raven might have noted now that he was moving in the manner of a drunken man.

His arm was still bleeding badly where she had bitten him, she saw. The bandage around his arm was soaked with red. She wondered if he was as dizzy as she was.

She wondered how badly she had weakened him.

"Fucking waste," he said to the steering wheel. It was not, Raven thought, that he had forgotten that she was there. It was simply that he had abandoned the most basic pretenses. "Waste of time even raising the ungrateful little freak – ought to have taken it out back and drowned it – It would have saved the trouble –"

"Daddy, look at me!" Raven shouted, and in her voice there were many voices, all laid over each other, slightly out of sync. Azazel's voice was there, among the others, as was her father's.

His head began to turn slowly, as though he were a man half asleep, and but the time it had turned all the way toward her she had finished changing her skin, and it was Azazel sitting in the seat beside him.

"You can't get away from me," she told her father in Azazel's heavily accented voice. "I am the Devil and you can't run away – you can't hide anywhere – because I am not going to stop until you let her go."

Raven wasn't sure if that was true, but she said it to scare her father, who she had come to see scared very easily. She didn't know if Azazel was a devil or a demon or a monster or a freak, and she didn't know what she was herself either, but she knew that she didn't want to stay with her father any longer.

She turned back into herself, the scales flowing down her body like rain, and part of her wanted to let the tears flow too, but there was a hard thing inside her chest now, a weight like a stone, and it remembered how he had used her as a shield. So she didn't cry.

"He's close now, Daddy, and he's coming closer. Can't you feel how close he is? You'd better run away – just let me out right here and run away." There was nothing _here_ but empty, snow-covered fields, and she had neither coat or shoes on, but she thought that Azazel would come back for her. Even if he didn't, she knew now that she needed to get away from her father. She supposed that she might have come to that realization on her own sooner rather than later, had she not met Azazel.

"Leave me here and go to the hospital – you'd better, you're really hurt," she begged. "How are you going to win this, Daddy, when are you going to sleep? He'll get me from you anyway, so you'd better just let me go and run away as far as you can, or the Devil is going to get you."

As though to prove it, Azazel appeared in the road ahead of them. He had two swords now instead of one, swords with wicked, curved blades. He held them out from his body, arms spread like wings, and it seemed to Raven that she had never seen anything that looked so absolutely deadly.

Her father stepped on the brake – out of shock or instinct – but then he changed his mind and stomped down on the gas pedal, propelling the limousine onward to where Azazel waited in the center of the road.

His eyes were narrowed, fixed on Azazel in the road ahead of him, and Raven saw her opening and made a grab for the gun.

She didn't get it – it was stuck in the holster, it wouldn't come free, and then her father slapped her away and she cracked her head against the window, and then the limo was sliding on the ice, fishtailing wildly.

They went off the road.

**II. **

Azazel had gone out of fear that Raven's father would kill Raven if he did not.

But the longer he stayed away, the greater his fear that the man might kill her regardless became.

It seemed better to fight than to wait passively – it seemed, in fact, quite impossible to wait any longer – and that was why he came back.

When the limo began to slide across the road he tried desperately to get a lock on the interior of the car, to get in there with them, thought what he would have done then he hadn't even time to consider.

It all happened so quickly, and then the limo was spinning off the road. It crashed into a fence post with a screech of metal. There was a musical chiming of broken glass raining down on the limo's crumpled hood.

_Neutralize the threat first_, Azazel thought to himself, letting his training take control of the situation.

He sheathed one of the swords and teleported to the driver's side of the limo, and wretched the door open.

The man's head was lolling against the steering wheel and Azazel watched him carefully for several seconds, the second blade held at the ready.

He did not allow his eyes to stray to the other side of the car, though his his heart jumped – half out of fear, half from joy – when he heard Raven whimper.

Her father was still breathing, but he didn't seem apt to move. Azazel pushed his limp body back against the seat and reached over him for the gun, removing it from its holster and slipping it under his belt.

The man was still breathing, but he wasn't moving. Azazel pushed his limp body back against the seat and reached over him for the gun, removing it from its holster deftly and slipping it under the band of his pants.

He waited another second – trying to quell the fear in his belly, willing his hands not to shake. Telling himself that this would not be like the last wreck he had witnessed, that what had happened to Pavel would not happen to the girl.

Then he turned to Raven.

**III.**

Raven's memories from there on were confused and jumbled, a mess of blurry images and words only half comprehended. She was badly concussed, though she lacked the terminology to diagnose herself.

She couldn't remember how she had come to be outside of the limo, but she found herself lying on its crumpled hood, looking up into the sky. It was snowing, big fat snowflakes falling down from heaven, and she wanted to open her mouth to try to catch one, but that seemed like far too much work.

There were hands running up and down her limbs, fingers prodding gingerly through her hair to check for skull fractures, taking inventory of every abrasion and gash, and after a little while Raven decided that they had to be Azazel's hands, because they seemed to be trying to be gentle and she couldn't remember any time her father had touched her except to cause hurt.

Azazel turned around, and Raven could see her father now, moving jerkily inside of the limo. She thought maybe he was caught behind the wheel, and that seemed good. It seemed like the best thing because that way he wouldn't get into any more trouble.

Only... she was a little worried that Azazel would want to hurt him, after everything he'd done. She didn't think she loved her father anymore, but she had loved him for a long time because there was no one else to love, so she wasn't sure that she wanted that.

"Run, Daddy," she said again, and then things started to get foggy again.

So maybe she only dreamed what she heard next. "Da, _run_," Azazel agreed. "But it won't make any difference."

**IV. **

It was nearly dawn before the mansion came into sight. Charles Xavier, the boy with the journal, was waiting for them half a mile outside of the grounds.

He had heard them coming a long way off. The teleporter's mental voice was strong – Charles wondered distractedly if that had something to do with his ability – and it had carried across space to him, repeating like a mantra the words that Charles himself had set down in writing.

_Not alone. _

_ Not alone. _

_ Not alone._

Azazel stared at him, and Charles felt the tinge of uncertainty and disappointment that soured the older boy's relief as he studied Charles's freckled, grinning face. _I did not imagine that he would be so young_, Azazel thought to himself in Russian, and Charles reached into his mind and found the means to translate the words easily. He frowned then, wet his lips anxiously.

"She needs help," Azazel said at last, and Charles sensed the hesitation, the way he amended the thought before putting it into words, striking through the _we_ that wanted so badly to slip from between his lips. He would not be good at asking for help, this Azazel, not for himself anyway. Charles could see that already.

"The doctor's been called," Charles reassured him, and before Azazel could vocalize the objection, he added, "None of them will see anything that I don't want them to see. You don't need to worry. It's safe here."

They turned and continued on toward the mansion.

**V.**

It was an alien thing for Azazel, to stand in the same room with the doctor and to know that the kindly old man did not see him as he was, saw only a regular boy, tailless and of a common complexion, and before very long he felt compelled to slip away, though he did not like the idea of leaving Raven alone.

There was a bad moment, while he was washing his hands in the bathroom basin, when he saw the red running down the sink and thought for an instant that the color was coming away from his skin. Then he understood that it was blood – Raven's blood, washing away from where it had dried on his hands, and the rage came flooding back. He reached down and touched the hilt of his sword, and looking out in the world with the extra sense his ability gave him found Raven's father in a hospital not far from here, and –

– And the instant before he teleported away, the knock came on the other side of the door. Charles voice was soft and intent. The degree of confidence that Charles would develop later in life was not entirely there yet, but he seemed to Azazel to be remarkably self-possessed for someone who could be no older than nine.

"I could keep you from going after that dreadful man," he said, through the door. "I could make it so you didn't want to, but I don't want to do that. I just want you to understand that Raven isn't going to like you anymore if you kill him."

There was a pause, and when Charles continued on his voice had become pensive. "I think we can really start something here – something like what you had back in Russia, but better. If you stay."

Azazel listened as Charles walked away, and his hand still clutching the sword hilt.

But after a while he followed.

**VI.**

Raven was sitting up in the bed when Azazel came back into the room, and the doctor was gone. She beamed woozily at him when he came in.

"Azazel!" she said. "Azazel, we're going to stay here, aren't we?" She added almost as an afterthought, "Charles says we can."

He looked around at the room with all its finery somewhat dubiously – it was true that he had spent a few days here, but it was still very different from what he was used to. Then he looked back to Raven's smiling face. "Okay," he said.

"It will all work out," Charles added brightly. "I'll send mother away on a holiday – sunny Spain, something like that..." He hesitated, and Azazel thought he glimpsed something raw and aching beneath Charles cheerful exterior; Azazel reflected briefly that being an orphan really wasn't all that bad, if most parents were like the ones he'd encountered so far.

Charles continued on. "Really, she needs a bit of a rest anyway. And we can find others –"

"Other Mutants," Azazel said, using the word he had found in Charles's journal.

"Right," Charles said, grinning ear to ear. "I haven't worked it all out yet, but we'll find them somehow, and you can fetch them back here and –"

"Shhh," Azazel said, raising a finger to his lips. Raven's eyes had fallen shut while he and Charles were talking.

"Right," Charles said, looking down at her. "I think everything's going to come out alright, you know," he added softly, and Azazel wasn't sure just whom he was addressing.

"I like this," Raven said without opening her eyes, burrowing deeper under the covers. "This is going to be like having a real family."


End file.
